Curtis Stigers released his 10th studio album on Tuesday, April 24th, his 7th album for Concord Records.  ”Let’s Go Out Tonight” was produced by Larry Klein and features songs by Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Richard Thompson, Neil Finn, Eddie Floyd, Steve Cropper, David Poe and more.                                                                           *Click Here to watch a short film that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Stigers’ new disc...

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*Click Here to read the wonderful album review from CriticalJazz.com…

*Click Here to read an interview with Curtis Stigers on Huffington Post…

*Click Here to read a great review from my hometown newspaper…

*Click Here to read a cool review from the very cool No Depression magazine…

By ANDREW MCKIE

When Curtis Stigers came on stage on Wednesday night it felt as if someone had upped the wattage in the bulbs. It ought to have been no surprise that Mr. Stigers is a competent turn on stage—this is, after all, a man whose first album sold more than 1.5 million copies. But I hadn’t quite been prepared for the sheer brio with which he tears into a crowd. The course of his career, and the chat I had had with him that morning, had given me the impression that this was a man backing away from the limelight.

And Ronnie Scott’s in Soho in central London, while the city’s best-known jazz club, and a place which has attracted the most stellar figures in the genre, holds no more than 250 people. Though they are jam-packed into the place, it’s hardly stadium rock. Yet, waving his saxophone in front of his body as if he were the lead guitarist in a 1980s hair metal band, Mr. Stigers is somehow contriving to suggest that this tiny venue is built along the lines of Madison Square Gardens.

Of course, Mr. Stigers used to have a lot of hair, and give concerts of that sort. Those who are only familiar with his hits “I Wonder Why” and “You’re All That Matters to Me,” from 1991, probably associate him with middle of the road soft rock ballads of the sort that Michael Bolton made his stock-in-trade. But over a pot of tea at a hotel around the corner from the club where he would be performing later, with his saxophone in a bag beside him, he is a more thoughtful, reserved-looking figure, who looks what he is these days—a classy purveyor of the staples of the Great American Songbook.

He seems slightly sheepish, but only slightly, at the reminder of his enormous earlier pop success. “What that period did, and I’m grateful for,” he says, “was give me a career. It allows me to tour—almost always over here, rather than in America—and work on songs. The older I get as a singer the less interested in being impressive I am and the more interested I am in the song and the story. I mean, I can scat sing and I studied music and there were times in my life when I definitely oversang, but now I want to do less, to serve the song.”

By accident, Mr. Stigers has managed to construct for himself the kind of career that many musicians would envy. As album sales have been hit by downloads and the growth in internet file-sharing, most artists now rely on touring for an income. “I know, I look kind of a genius now, because I decided quite early that I would rather not worry about selling albums but concentrate on selling tickets for shows,” he says. “I don’t like to do too much, though. If I do 100 dates, that would be a big year for me these days. I’ve got an 11-year-old daughter and I hate being away from her. I’m kind of a homebody.”

This decision—which in retrospect looks like a remarkably canny move—may have been partly prompted by his early disagreements with his record label which, after the chart success of his first record (to say nothing of his appearance on the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard,” an album which sold 17 million copies in the U.S. alone), was understandably keen to promote him as a rock/soul singer. But Mr. Stigers’ musical tastes have always been more catholic than those early recordings suggested.

“I love pop music,” he says. “I grew up listening to it on the radio in Idaho and I loved Elton John, Stevie Wonder, all that stuff. I learned to harmonize by the time I was five, but I listened to everything. As a teenager I discovered punk—about three years after the Sex Pistols had already split—and I was mainly a punk rock drummer then. But I’d learned clarinet and saxophone at school, so there was always jazz, because that’s the music for those instruments. I had broad tastes.”

He is cagey, though, about the temptation jazz offers for musicians to sacrifice the audience’s pleasure to virtuosity. “Jazz is a language that’s a little more challenging to learn than pop music or even the blues. All music takes a moment for your ear to turn to, but jazz especially, because there’s that bit more to navigate and know about it,” he says. “I think a great jazz musician, no matter how complicated the music he’s playing is, communicates with an audience. I think if you’d been lucky enough to see someone like John Coltrane, even if what he was doing was technically very challenging, and you didn’t get all of it—not to get all metaphysical about it, but the transcendence of what he did—it’s going to knock you out.”

In concert, Mr. Stigers concentrates on the jazz standards—there is, indeed, some scat, admirably spot on in tone and pitch, during his rendition of “Bye Bye Blackbird”—but what sets him apart is his readiness to expand the repertoire. The wide musical hinterland of his upbringing and his excursions into the world of pop make unexpected appearances; there is a brilliant cover of a Randy Newman number, and while performing his own song “You’ve Got the Fever,” co-written with a bass player from his home town of Boise, there are sly nods not only to Peggy Lee, but even Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.

“For a long time jazz musicians just didn’t cover popular songs from about the 50s on,” he says. “Because, I guess, rock and roll killed the ability to make a living playing jazz, and they just shunned that whole body of work for decades. Every so often someone would cover ‘Michelle’ by the Beatles or something, because it has jazz chords anyway, but the view was rock music sucked.”

Before that, as he points out, jazz did reinterpret popular songs—particularly show tunes. “Something like ‘My Favorite Things’ or ‘How High the Moon’— they weren’t jazz standards until they became jazz standards,” he says. “When I write, actually, I tend to concentrate on melody and I write on the guitar because I’m not that great of a guitarist; though in Boise, there are great players near where I work, so I just knock on the wall and get them over.”

Mr. Stigers then reimagines these songs, and others by popular songwriters, for a jazz band.

“I have tried many times to write songs with jazz musicians and they always sound like ‘Ba-ba-do-ba-do-ba-doobie-do’; some really angular instrumental thing that you could never write a lyric to. But because my playing on harmonic instruments is pretty basic, it suits me to write something much simpler.

“I’ll write a song that sounds like Neil Young or Loudon Wainwright or Al Green or something and then take it to bits with the band and put it back together as a jazz tune. You’ve got to put yourself out there and make those mistakes, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”

And sometimes, as on Wednesday night, it works very well indeed.

Curtis Stigers plays Ronnie Scott’s tonight and the Edinburgh Jazz Festival on Sunday.

Greetings from Birmingham, England! I’m over here getting ready for a Friday night (March 5) performance with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. We’ll be performing the “John Lennon Songbook” – a performance conducted by John Wilson and featuring Claire Martin, Mark McGann, and little old me.

I’ll tell you what. There really is nothing quite like singing with an orchestra!

And – to make it even better I’ll be singing with an orchestra AGAIN next week. Thurs March 10th I’ll be in the National Concert Hall in Dublin, Ireland singing with the RTE Concert Orchestra – this time singing the music from the MGM musicals. John Wilson is conducting again, and joining me will be Kim Criswell. Talk about some fun music.

I’ve got performances coming up with my band in Denmark, Germany, England and other places, so please stay tuned and keep an eye on my website for more details.

I hope to see you at a show soon.

Cheers!
Curtis

First the reminder:
Tickets are on sale now for my last concert of the year with my band, and it’s happening in my hometown. Matthew, Keith, Cliff, Scrapper and I will be performingMonday, November 15th at 8pm at the historic Egyptian Theatre in Boise Idaho. You can buy tickets online on my website, curtisstigers.com, or at The Record Exchange and The Boise Co-Op. My Boise shows tend to sell out quickly so hurry up and get your tickets now!

Now the recommendation:
Mavis Staples is one of the greatest singers of all time and she’s playing right here in Boise tomorrow night (also at the Egyptian Theatre), Tuesday, November 2. Mavis was the voice of the legendary Staple Singers, a group that not only had numerous soul/gospel/r&b hits during the ’60s and ’70s including “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me),” “I’ll Take You There,” “Respect Yourself” and “Let’s Do It Again” but they also made a stunning appearance in one of my favorite films, Martin Scorcese’s The Last Waltz. The chance to see and hear Mavis Staples is a gift and the opportunity of a lifetime and you should not miss it. Her new album was produced by Jeff Tweedy from the band Wilco and it’s really great. I’ve been listening to it over and over again. I’m guessing you’ll be able to buy the new disc at Mavis’s Egyptian show and, who knows, maybe she’ll even sign it for you. Click here for ticket info…

I’ll see you on Main Street in Boise!!!

I’m here in Liverpool this weekend to sing John Lennon songs with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Ochestra on a great day of remembrance and celebration: John Lennon’s 70th birthday. I can’t begin to express the thrill that I feel being here for such a momentous occasion. The shows have been sold out for ages, so I won’t bore you with trying to sell you tickets, but if you have a moment this Saturday, October 9th, and feel so inclined, raise a glass and toast the memory and legacy of one of the great human beings of the 20th century. John Lennon was not just a brilliant songwriter and musician, he was champion for peace and justice in a time when he could have just been sitting back and counting his money and resting on his laurels. Cheers, John! Here’s to you, Walrus. Happy Birthday. Goo Goo G’joob…

Next weekend I’ll be in China with the Liverpool Philharmonic (and Claire Martin and Mark McGann) to perform the same Lennon program, so if you happen to be in Shanghai on October 17, or Beijing on October 19, come on out and see the show. I’ll also be celebrating my birthday while I’m there, so I’ll be raising a glass or two myself. I’ll need it to numb the pain in my arms from all the vaccine jabs I had to get to visit China for the first time. But, I’m safe from Typhoid and Hepatitis now, so I’ve got that going for me…

My next couple of shows after China are in the USA, a nation in which I perform far too infrequently these days:

My band and I will be at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts in Bloomington, Illinois on November 13…

Then, on November 15, we’ll be back in my beloved hometown, Boise, Idaho, right there on Main Street at the historic Egyptian Theatre. Tickets are on sale now on my website. Get ‘em while they’re hot! My Boise shows usually sell out quickly.

After that I’ll be heading back to the UK for a tour of the Celebration Of MGM Musicals that I was part of last summer at The Proms at Royal Albert Hall.

You can find out about all of this on my website, curtisstigers.com

I hope to see you soon at a show! As always, I’m grateful for your continued support and interest.

Curtis

Hello friends,

Well, I’m back home after a wonderful sold-out summer tour of the UK and Germany, and I’m going to take a couple weeks off to hang out with my family, get some sun and ride my mountain bike. Thanks to all of you who made it out to the shows this summer. It’s always such a thrill and a privilege to play music for you. (Check out the great Ronnie Scott’s London review in PRESS)

So I’m on holiday, but I will be playing a little music while I’m off-duty! Here’s a special alert for my friends and fans back home in Idaho: This weekend, Friday August 13 and Saturday August 14, I’ll be joining in the merriment of the reunion of The Hi-Tops at The VAC in Garden City, ID. I was a member of the Hi-Tops back in the mid-1980’s (yes, that was during the last century, kiddies), and it’s always a wild, energetic, entertaining party getting back together with them. We’re all a little grayer, balder and paunchier, but we can still rock, Baby!!! Come on out and re-live your mis-spent youth dancing and drinking cold draft beer with us!

Later in the month my band (the current one from this century) and I will be making a couple rare US appearances. We’ll be playing in Vail, Colorado on August 26, and in Lewiston, New York on August 28. I’ve also got a bunch of very interesting shows in Scotland, Germany, France, England and China (yes, CHINA!) coming up in the Autumn.

Have a great summer!
See you soon,
Curtis

Middle age suits Curtis Stigers better than his long-haired youth. Immaculate in tie, suit and breast-pocket handkerchief, he is smack bang in fashion, making the kind of Blue Note post-bop to which 1960s ad executives sipped martinis. He comes across like an amalgam of Mad Men characters Roger Sterling and Jimmy Barrett… [read more...]

4 out of 5 Stars
* John L Walters (guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 August 2010)

Middle age suits Curtis Stigers better than his long-haired youth. Immaculate in tie, suit and breast-pocket handkerchief, he is smack bang in fashion, making the kind of Blue Note post-bop to which 1960s ad executives sipped martinis. He comes across like an amalgam of Mad Men characters Roger Sterling and Jimmy Barrett.

His band hits its stride immediately with Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right Mama. John “Scrapper” Sneider’s cool, poised trumpet solo (quoting Gil Evans) is the perfect foil to Stigers’s dry vocal. But Stigers is not a rock singer attempting maturity through jazz. He’s a jazzer who lucked into pop stardom. Which is why he can get under the skin of standards such as The Meaning of the Blues, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning and All the Things You Are, which he dedicates to his wife.

He follows this classy interpretation with Jealous Guy, a moving reinvention sung over swirling trio accompaniment by Matthew Fries (piano), Cliff Schmitt (bass) and drummer Keith Hall doing convincingly Elvin Joneslike “circles of sound” – John Lennon meets John Coltrane. Other postmodern touches include the clever San Diego Serenade (by Tom Waits), a jazzy version of Stigers’s hit You’re All That Matters to Me and the Beatles’ I Feel Fine – a version so “jazz casual” we should be watching it in black and white.

This is vocal jazz as smart and knowing as the best American TV, as Stigers integrates 50 years of jazz modernism in a way that avoids histrionics and supper-club populism. He has a likable authenticity that makes Michael Bublé look like Mad Men’s Pete Campbell. After the encore, Stigers thanks us with a chiselled grin: “You’re the best Monday night audience we’ve ever had!”

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

See you there.
-Curtis

Tony Doerr Book Launch Thursday, July 8

Join the celebration as Anthony Doerr reads from his newest book, Memory Wall, joined by special guest Curtis Stigers.

When: Thursday, July 8 Time: Doors open at 6:30 PM, reading starts at 7:00 PM Where: The Linen Building, 1402 W. Grove St. 
Cost: $10 and are available right now from The Cabin, or at the door on July 8. All proceeds from the ticket sales will benefit The Cabin. Mr. Doerr’s books will be available for sale and signing at the event. Call The Cabin at 208.331.8000.

But before that starts, let me update you on the end of the summer season:
On August 22nd, I returned from Dublin, Ireland, where I took part in a lovely concert at the National Concert Hall with actor/singer Mark McGann, British jazz singer Claire Martin, Conductor-extraordinaire John Wilson and The RTE Concert Orchestra. The show was a reprise of the John Lennon Songbook concert we did last summer in Liverpool with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s really a lovely show-amazing songs of course, very emotional and powerful text. I hope we have a chance to do it again.

When I returned I began three quiet weeks at home with my family. We attended the Western Idaho Fair, which is just as you’d imagine it: Rollercoasters, tasty greasy food, cold draft beer, carnival rides and games, farm animals (my daughter milked a cow), and cotton candy, too. Good fun with a little nausea thrown in for good measure. I’ve been going to this fair since I was a kid (with a 16 year hiatus while I lived in New York City) and it’s still the same. Great people watching. Then we spent a few days sitting on a dock and swimming at Payette Lake in McCall Idaho, where we were visiting our friends who have a lakefront cabin. Very relaxing. Got a good tan and even waterskied a little.

Soon after that we visited LaJolla, California to celebrate my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday. Happy birthday, Virginia! Hung out at the beach and played some tennis. More tanning opportunities. Very relaxing. Then we were back to Boise for the beginning of the school year. Back to getting up 7am for all of us. Ouch.
I’m writing this on a plane as I fly home from Los Angeles, where I flew to attend the Emmy Awards. As previously mentioned, “This Life,” a song that I co-wrote and sang for the opening credits of a the FX Network’s hit TV show “Sons Of Anarchy” was nominated for an Emmy, and I figured I ought to show up, just for the absurd showbiz spectacle of it, you know? I was invited to ride to the event with my new friend Seth McFarlane, the creator/producer/actor of the show “The Family Guy” in his stretch limo. Seth’s a good man and funny as hell so it was a good time. When we arrived at the show, I stood back on the red carpet while Seth posed for the paparazzi and did interviews with all the tabloid entertainment shows. It was actually very nice to be an observant outsider in that world, some years after having been in the middle of that crazy scene. It always felt strange and foreign to me to be in that circus and it was educational and amusing to see it from another, rather anonymous, angle. During the awards at The Nokia Theater, I sat with my co-writers, Bob Thiele, Jr. and Dave Kushner and watched Carol Burnett, Katy Segal, Ted Danson and even my pal Seth give out the awards. When it came to our moment, as I always predicted it would happen, the legendary and brilliant composer and conductor John Williams kicked our butts and sent us packing. I figure it’s a win-win. I’m now and forever an Emmy Nominated songwriter and I can always say, “I remember when I lost that Emmy Award to John Williams…” Pretty good feather in my cap. Sadly, Mr. Williams was not in attendance, so I didn’t get to meet him or to challenge him to arm-wrestle me. I could could have whipped his ass in that category, I’m convinced.

Now we’re beginning our descent into the Boise airport. See you on the ground, and out on the road…

Ping Pong in Jena

I’m on a tour bus hurtling down the German Autobahn, headed from Wiesbaden to Fredrichshafen to play another show with my band. We’re on a short tour of outdoor festivals here and then we fly to Heathrow to do one show at the Snapes Maltings concert hall in Aldeburgh, a small village on the east coast of England. The Aldeburgh festival is primarily a classical music festival, but they’re slumming it with a Curtis Stigers concert this weekend. It’s a lovely place, a lovely hall. We played a classical festival last night in Wiesbaden, too: The Rheingau Musik Festival. It was a good show. The audience was more polite and careful than we’re used to, but we warmed them up. By the end of the show they were really into it. The night before we were in Jena, a town of 200,000 that was in the East before the wall came down. Great show, nearly 2000 people in the audience. We played a little ping pong backstage. The band and I were invited to an aftershow party with the Bergermeister (mayor) and some of the local business bigwigs. Carl Zeiss, the famous optics pioneer was from Jena and that’s a big business there. Talked politics with the mayor and the head of Jenoptics and drank too much wine. Good fun. We also had a return show in a little Circus-style tent venue in Kassel Germany called Kulturzelt. Once again they treated us to copious amounts of Pils (beer) and German sausages as we sat outside in the garden after the show. It beats working for a living…

Last week I was in London for the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall. I sang several classic numbers (Stepping Out With My Baby, Heather On The Hill, Our Love Is Here To Stay, Well Did You Evah? Etc…) from MGM musicals with The John Wilson Orchestra. It was amazing. Televised live and on radio, with several other singers including Baritone Sir Thomas Allen, and Seth MacFarlane, the creator and star of The Family Guy. It was an all-star orchestra, hand-picked by John Wilson, who has painstakingly re-constructed all the long-lost orchestral scores by transcribing them note for note from recordings. Even the rehearsals were inspiring. The violinists in the back row were section leaders in their own orchestras. Virtuostic playing. We had a lot of laughs (not only is Seth a very funny guy, but Sir Tom matched us joke for joke). You can see some of the RAH performances on You Tube. My family joined me for the whole lovely week in London. What a great way to make a living this is…

I’m home next week and then to Dublin for an August 21st performance of The John Lennon Songbook with John Wilson and the RTE Concert Orchestra, along with British jazz singer Clare Martin and actor/singer Mark McGann. We did the same show with the Liverpool Philharmonic last summer, and I loved it. Happy summer…

Sausages & Pils in Kassel

Available in iTunes

Big news!!!  Curtis Stigers has been nominated for an Emmy Award by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences!  Last year Curtis co-wrote and sang the theme song to the critically acclaimed new FX TV series The Sons Of Anarchy, and the song has been nominated for “Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music.”  In the same category, the legendary film composer and arranger John Williams is also nominated.  “This is such a thrill!  I’m up against the guy who wrote the Star Wars Theme!  Holy spaceballs, R2D2!  I haven’t been nominated for anything since I was in the running for ‘Most Likely To Own A Small Potato Farm’ back in high school!” Stigers says.  Curtis is picking out his bow tie and matching cumberbund for the big night right now…